sfcrazy writes: There is no doubt that Canonical is looking at the ARM based hardware for its tablets. But Microsoft seemed to have nipped Ubuntu's Tablet in the bud. The company tweaked its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8. This was the hardware that was going to be used by Ubuntu Tablets.

Samfer writes: With what seems to becoming the routine, Valve recently decided to take matters into their own hands yet again with regards to the marketing of their upcoming title Portal 2. As they did in the past with the Left 4 Dead series, Valve has cast aside the mainstream creative ad agencies labeling them as “pretty close to worthless” and offering “copycat treatments”.

Tasha26 writes: BBC has an interesting web security snippet from the SyScan 2010 security conference in Singapore. In a presentation, security researcher Laurent Oudot released details of bugs found in commonly used attack-kits such as Neon, Eleonore and Sniper, proving that not only are they not secure but these loopholes could be exploited to get more information about the attackers, perhaps identifying them, stealing their tools and methods, or even following the trail back to their own computer.

Binary Boy writes: Bradley Manning, the US Army Private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion.

timothy writes: Federal judge rebukes Homeland Security, which had claimed it can seize a traveler's laptop and search it six months later without warrant. Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Politics and Law.

Trailrunner7 writes: Early this morning Google’s Tavis Ormandy published a vulnerability in the hcp protocol handler. It allows the attacker to run arbitrary commands as the user.Google has been the loudest proponent for responsible disclosure in the past. But if you look at the dates in his post, he says he reported it to Microsoft on the 5th of June (a Saturday), who responded the same day. He sent the advisory early in the morning today the 10th of June — meaning Google gave Microsoft less than 5 days to fix it. Even Mozilla backed down from 10 day turn around, and they’re only running a single software suite. How is that possibly reasonable to expect a company like MS to turn around a patch in 4-5 days and then get so upset that then you must go full disclosure? And it’s not like Tavis was acting on his own — he credits other security researchers inside of Google for their help. So apparently it’s okay for Google to go full disclosure, but not for other researchers. The hypocrisy is amazing.

An anonymous reader writes: Shortly after introducing their optional 'make-Google-look-like-Bing' background image, somebody at Google decided to force the background on people, prompting 'remove google background' to shoot to 2nd on google trends. The shocking part is not just that the background is default, but now is UNREMOVABLE.

As a fun bonus, those who use RDP or similar remote connections can enjoy waiting several seconds while the high resolution background image slowly fades into view...